Westrobothnian (måLe or bondska[1]) is a number of closely related non-standardized Scandinavian dialects spoken natively along the coast of the historical province of Westrobothnia in co-existence with Finnish, Sami and in recent centuries, the national standard language Swedish. Westrobothnian is the northernmost dialect group of the North Germanic languages in Sweden and borders the traditional Sami-speaking Lapland to the west and Finnish-speaking Torne Valley to the north. Like all Scandinavian, the different varieties of Westrobothnian originate in Proto-Norse and dialects of Old Norse, spoken by immigrating Germanic settlers during the Viking Age.

Westrobothnian has three grammatical genders in most dialects, two plural forms of indefinite nouns, and broad usage of definite nouns. Nouns are also inflected differently in the dative and accusative case, some adjectives can be serially joined with nouns and some have two plural forms. A pleonastic article is always used before names when referring to someone; in the vocative, a name may instead be declined similarly to how words for near kin decline in the vocative.

A small population of Nordic tribes inhabited the area as early as the Bronze Age, as is supported by evidence from recent archeological findings in Backen and Jävre. While Sami cultures have been present around the inner parts of Westrobothnia for several thousand years, all forms of Westrobothnian are developments from Germanic-speaking settlers, arriving along the coast of the Scandinavian peninsula. Sami languages can be considered native to historical Sápmi and Westrobothnian native to old Westrobothnia[citation needed] except for Torne Valley, where meänkieli Finnish traditionally has been the native tongue of the region; original Westrobothnia refers to the coastal areas of contemporary Västerbotten and Norrbotten.

Westrobothnian dialects, in their different forms, were historically the native tongues in Umeå and Skellefteå; in Kalix and Luleå, they coexisted with Kven language before gradually becoming the majority language of the region. These two cities are now part of Norrbotten County but before 1810, they belonged to Westrobothnia and so their dialects are included in the Westrobothnian dialect continuum, the different dialects of Westrobothnian are also present in southern and central Lapland, where it was introduced in the late 17th century as the colonization of traditional Sami lands begun. Each person was promised 15 tax-free years and other state privileges for settling what was then referred to as Lappmarkerna, and many people from the coasts started moving up the river valleys to settle villages such as Arvidsjaur, Lycksele and as far north as Eastern Jokkmokk, which brought different dialects of Westrobothnian to the Lapland region that had until then spoken Sami.

The dialects' main characteristics developed largely independently of Standard Swedish for almost a millennium until 1850, when Standard Swedish was introduced to all citizens through the public school system, at first, they co-existed peacefully but during the 1930s the repression of genuine dialects and non-North Germanic languages was at its peak. Children were prohibited from using their native tongue, labelled as ugly and inappropriate, in school. Standard Swedish is based on the dialects spoken in Svealand and Götaland and so differed considerably from the Westrobothnian tongues, even more than the differences between Standard Swedish and the neighbouring Norwegian and Danish languages. The cities soon became mostly Swedish-speaking while the native tongues still maintained a strong stance in rural areas and minor towns for many decades to come, the native tongues were gradually weakened as an urbanization process went on and TV and radio broadcasts were exclusively in standard Swedish, making the native tongues appear backward.

The misleading nickname "bondska" has played a big part in making the native tongues less attractive since it is derived from the Swedish word for peasant; it is widely used and causes a lot of misconceptions. The name was most likely not invented by the native speakers and should be considered pejorative[according to whom?] since the word "bonde" or "bonnigt" is either used pejoratively for denoting something uncultivated or to refer to the occupation of farming. But the name was implemented and eventually turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy as the city population gradually switched to Swedish and people from the villages were highly discouraged about using their native tongues when moving to the city.

The correct term in Swedish is "Västerbottniska" although it is rarely used; the notion of a Westrobothnian dialect group that includes Piteå, Luleå and Kalix dialects is unknown to most people but the pejorative name remains in use in the entire region to denote the regional dialect.

During a large part of the 20th century, many citizens did not speak their native tongues in the cities because it was looked down upon but once back in their villages they switched to their native tongue.

The Vikings are known for their ships and most likely visited the Bothnian Bay thousands of years ago[dubious– discuss] as some archeological findings indicate, but there is no clear evidence of Norsemen or Germanic settlement along the river valleys in the area. The first Germanic settlers were probably a combination of farmers, hunters and fishermen, arriving in southern Westrobothnia around 900 AD and northern parts around 1100 AD, in the late stages of the Viking Age.

Different theories exist as of how exactly Westrobothnia came to be settled by Germanic speakers, as in e.g. Umeå, Luleå and Piteå, but they were probably using small boats to move along the coast and up along river valleys, generation after generation settling river by river. Most of the coast seems to have been uninhabited during the Viking age but some settlements of unknown origin existed during the iron age. There are no Sami loan words in the Westrobothnian coastal dialects, except for in the dialects spoken in the much later settlements in Lapland, such as Malå and Arjeplog dialects. Most likely Sami people did not have a notable presence in the coastal areas of historical Westrobothnia although they did visit the coast occasionally with their cattle, moving down the river valleys in the summer, some settlements were close to the coast such as Koler in Piteå Municipality and most likely Kåddis outside Umeå but the majority of all names of villages and lakes are of North Germanic origin.

Early Westrobothnian settlements typically end with -böle or -mark and most of them are from the pre-Christian era, the villages with the ending -mark are derived from a male name; for example, Tvare for Tväråmark in Umeå municipality or Arne for Arnemark outside Piteå. The highest density of villages ending with -mark is found between Umeå and Skellefteå.

The Germanic settlers spoke a north dialectal development of proto-Norse, related to, but not equal to[citation needed] the Old Norse spoken by Vikings many hundred kilometers down the Scandinavian coast. Old Norse is rather well preserved in runestones and later also in a Bible translation, but few runic inscriptions have been found north of Svealand, and none at all in what is now the administrative areas Västerbotten and Norrbotten apart from the runic inscriptions found in Burträsk where minor runic inscriptions was found in the early 20th century. This suggests that the farming settlers finally reaching Westrobothnia had little contact with southern Scandinavia during the Viking age, and most probably already by then had developed different lingual features, some of which are still preserved in some Westrobothnian dialects, particularly in the dialects spoken in Skellefteå and Bureå.

The citizens of the area around Umeå and Skellefteå were initially referred to as speakers of the Old Norse dialect Helsingemål during the early Viking age.

During the 14th century, the Hanseatic League started dominating trade in the Baltic sea, mostly speaking Middle Low German. Trade routes might have gone as far up north as to the Bothnian bay, and that might have influenced the languages in the region since some similarities exist between Westrobothnian and German/Dutch in pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar. After the Consolidation of Sweden, this uprising power started to take control of trade along the coast, and exploit what was named lappmarken (the Sami lands), by using birkarls (trade men).

Christianity also came to the relatively non-organized and free Germanic settlers, who by then might have been practicising variants of Norse mythology. A monastery was built in Bureå in the early 15th century, and with the arrival of Christianity, priests began registering all family relationships in the villages, and since this new era there is a better knowledge of the local history, also from preserved documents and maps used for taxation.

The Swedish school came to Westrobothnia in the 1850s, with the goal of teaching everyone to read, write, speak and understand standard Swedish with its grammar, this was, at first, a rather peaceful form of language education, but escalated under the early 1930s into a system where students were forbidden to speak all forms of local languages in the classrooms throughout Sweden. Similar laws existed in Scotland were speakers of Scottish Gaelic were forbidden to use their language in schools as a result of the 1872 Education Act; in Westrobothnia, parents were informed that "the Swedish standard language was the future", and that "children can only learn one language properly", and therefore local languages "will handicap them in a future society based solely on standard Swedish". These ideas have been proven well and truly wrong by later research into the field of multilingualism, but they had a huge influence on many relatively small societies like Umeå and Skellefteå where those living in Umeå today could be accused of speaking a dialect which is far more influenced by Standard Swedish than by the far purer Skellefteå dialect, the Westrobothnian dialect spoken in Skellefteå has maintained a lot of influence of Westrobothnian language in terms of pronunciation and certain words but among the younger generation very few people know how to properly speak the Westrobothnian language or even understand it. Nowadays however people are encouraged to use Westrobothnian as much as possible, and students are encouraged to study whatever local form of Westrobothnian that is spoken in their home-town but the language still remains severely threatened of extinction.

The nickname bondska is derived from the word bonde, meaning peasant, and causes many misconceptions about the languages, the nickname might have been somewhat accurate hundreds of years ago since most people lived of agriculture at that time, but most speakers in the late 19th and early 20th century were not just peasants but ordinary working-class people. The language initially started disappearing in the cities and therefore came to be even more associated with rural areas. Many people believe that Westrobothnian is a language that uneducated peasants made up since they couldn't learn proper Swedish when it is actually the native language of the entire region and standard Swedish is in fact a language that was imposed by the school system and the authorities. State language policies caused the language to be seen as even more rural and backward, thus starting a downward spiral, the language has more speakers around and in the industrial cities of Piteå and Skellefteå, especially in the former, and a far weaker position in and around the regional capitals Umeå and Luleå. It is still being considered an incorrect dialect of Swedish by many.

There are notable differences between the dialects since they have never been standardized but the lexical similarity and grammar is without a doubt far more similar than if one of them is compared to standard Swedish. A standardization of the different dialects would make it more attractive to learn and raise the awareness of them as the endangered native tongues that they indeed are.

There are no official signs with Westrobothnian names; Westrobothnian places like Uum, Schélett, Peeit, Leeul and Kôlis are written in cartographic Swedish as Umeå, Skellefteå, Piteå, Luleå and Kalix.

While Westrobothnian was made a taboo subject in many ways by the Swedish educational system, and it thus lack the historical documentation that the most northern Westrobothnian dialect, the Kalix dialect can boast with, the Kalix dialect is however a bit different from the others and mutual intelligibility with more southern dialects is not very high. A large number of modern writers, artists and musicians use different forms of Westrobothnian on a daily basis. Several prominent Swedish writers have used Westrobothnian in their novels mixing the dialects with various degrees of standard Swedish, among them Sara Lidman, Niclas Lundkvist (AKANikanor Teratologen) and Torgny Lindgren and a number of short stories and collections of idioms have been written.[2][3]

Furthermore, it is worth noting that several different scholarly studies into different forms of Westrobothnian have been published over the years, among them a study of Norsjö Westrobothnian.[4]

A number of dictionaries exist to aid the speakers and learners of Westrobothnian as well. A dictionary documenting the language spoken in Vännäs, a municipality in southern Westrobothnia was published in 1995 after 8 years of studies [5] and the speakers of Skellefteå Westrobothnian have published a number of different grammars and dictionaries.[6][7]

Adjectives mostly decline in neuter, adding -t or changing -i(n) for -e, although the variation in -in versus -i may represent the older masculine and feminine forms. Adjectives not ending in -i(n) sometimes have masculine declension, as in st(å)orer stöɽing(j)en “a big boy”, alternating with n st(å)or( n )stöɽing. More common than -er is -e, which is used in all genders: häile ättermeda(je)n (masculine) “all afternoon”; st(å)ore f(å)ola (feminine) “a great lot”; häile hvärve (neuter) “the whole set of clothes”.

The articles used are äin (n) for masculine words, äi(n) ([i]n) for feminine, äitt (i) for neuter, and in plural (äin)a for all genders. In a construction like “a big house”, the article is doubled: i st(å)ort i h(e)us; but is lacking in “the big house”, where adjective and noun merge: st(å)orh(e)use. Pronouns are also declined: ann hvorn dag “every other day”, annar hvor bjerk “every other birch”, anne hvort h(e)us “every other house”.

All nouns have an indefinite and a definite singular and plural form, and definite dative singular and plural forms, the declinations are slightly different depending on original syllable length.

In addition to the patterns below, long monosyllabic masculine words ending in a vowel, like snjö “snow”, also have the dative ending -(r)no(m), and feminine words of the same type may have that dative form in plural, these type of words are also often unchanged in the indefinite plural. Another quirk is that monosyllabic masculine and feminine nouns that are rarely or not at all used in plural have grave accent in the dative rather than acute, e.g.; mjɒ́ɽka “the milk”, but mjɒ̀ɽken “the milk (dat.)”, and krɒ́ppen “the body”, but krɒ̀ppo(m) “the body (dat.)”; this does not affect the neuter dative form as it always has the grave accent. Rarely indefinite dative forms are found, and only in the singular: mö̀rn’ “morning”; in these examples, the sign ’ in final position marks where grave accent within a single syllable forms circumflex accent due to apocope of long syllable, and the combination rn represents /ɳ/ and kj/t͡ɕ/.

The definite noun form is used in a broader sense than in other Scandinavian languages, which is typical in all dialects spoken in northern Scandinavia.[8] Most typically, wordings like “made of wood” or “I like bread” would have “wood” and “bread” in their definite forms in Westrobothnian, while Danish, Swedish and Norwegian would use the indefinite forms.

Dative is separated from the Accusative and Nominative case, in that it differs from the two others, which are identical. Whenever a dative is used, the dative suffix -åm or -o(m) is added to masculine nouns, to some -(r)nåm or -no(m), whereas the suffix -(e)n is added to feminine nouns, and -e(r)n (rarely -[r]n) to neuters. In all cases, the plural ending is identical to masculine singular, although the accent may still differentiate masculine singular and plural; e.g. stǽino(m) “stone” stæ̀ino(m) “stones”; this is less common for words that mostly are only used in singular; e.g. krɒ̀ppo(m) “body/bodies”; and some forms retain grave accent by having other distinctions: sk(å)òjo(m) “the forest” vs. sk(å)ògo(m) “the forests”. Some plurals also display -nåm/-no(m). For the pronouns männ “mine”, dänn “thine”, sänn “himself/herself/itself”, the respective dative forms are m-/d-/s- -i(r)no(m), -ännar, -i(r)ne, and plural all cases -i(r)no(m). Examples in masculine singular: nom./acc. vájen mä́nn “my road”, dat. (opp)a vàjom mìrnom “(up)on my road”. Note that -i- becomes -öy- and -äi- in the northernmost dialects, where also -o is used for -om, so e.g. mi(r)nom is möyno or mäino.

Verbs are conjugated in singular and plural in present, past, and imperative, usually also past subjunctive and sometimes present subjunctive, and the prefix o- is used with perfect participles to denote that something has not happened yet, e.g. h(e)u hav ofyri “she hasn't left yet”, literally “she has un-gone”. No suffix marks the present tense except for the words få/fa “receive, give” gå/ga “walk, go” and stå/sta “stand”, which display -r in singular.

A common pattern is that the present and imperative singular is a monosyllabically accented or shorter version of the infinitive, and that the plural present is identical to the infinitive, e.g.; kåma “come” has singular present and imperative kåm, plural present kåma. For strong verbs, the imperative plural tends to appear as the supine form plus -e(r)n, e.g.; supine kömi “(has) come” + -en = köm(j)e(r)n! “(you) come!”. Likewise, sl(j)ɒ “beat, mow” has supine slæije and plural imperative slæije(r)n “(you) beat, mow!”. Since the infinitive is already monosyllabic with monosyllabic accent, the present singular and imperative are unchanged. Weak verbs like l(j)ès “lock” (Old Norselæsa) has singular present and imperative l(j)és, plural present l(j)ès, plural imperative l(j)èse(r)n.

The pleonastic article is widespread among languages in the area, as far north as Troms.[9] A pleonastic article, marking the opposite of the vocative, is put before people's names, pet's names, and words denoting the immediate family, the masculine form is n, and the feminine form is a. For example; “father is home” is n far jär hæ̀im’. In dative, n becomes om or o, e.g. ɒt om Jɒ̀nk’ “to John”.

In early scientific literature, a phonetic alphabet landsmålsalfabetet (LMA), developed by Johan August Lundell was used to write most northern dialects, while the most widely used informal form of writing is based on the Latin alphabet with a few added symbols, including the letters å, ä, ö, a capitalised L or bolded l, apostrophe for marking long or diacritic accents, etc. Since no formal standard has been developed, slight differences can be found among different writers, the lack of a standardized writing system has made the dialects drift more and more towards the standard language, and many short stories written in Westrobothnian have been influenced by standard Swedish to various degrees.

1.
Westrobothnia
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Västerbotten, known in English as West Bothnia or Westrobothnia, is a province in the north of Sweden, bordering Ångermanland, Lapland, North Bothnia and the Gulf of Bothnia. It is known for the named after the province. The traditional provinces of Sweden serve no administrative or political purposes, the administrative county, Västerbotten County, consists of the province and the southern part of Swedish Lappland. On 18 January 1884 all provinces gained the rights to the rank of duchy, blazon, Azure Seme of Mullets Or a Reindeer in full course and hoofed Gules. Västerbotten was historically divided into chartered cities and districts, umeå Skellefteå The historical province Västerbotten was divided in court districts. Highest mountain, Åmliden Largest lake, Bygdeträsket The famous Swedish author Torgny Lindgren was born here, up until the Finnish War 1808-1809 and the Treaty of Fredrikshamn the province of Västerbotten also included a small portion of the extreme north of current Finland. This part has later been integrated in Lapland, Finland, the Österbotten, Eastern Botten or Ostrobothnia lay on the Finnish side of the sea and this province name still survives. Following the Fredrikshamn treaty, which redefined the outlines and orientation of Sweden, the northern portion became Norrbotten County, and the Swedish-speaking locals of Norrbotten soon began referring to themselves as Norrbothnians. The county borders thus gradually led to a provincial identity. Nowadays Norrbotten is considered a province, even though provinces had ceased to have any administrative or legal significance hundreds of years before 1810. Västerbotten Regiment was the provincial regiment, since the 13th century, Swedish princes in some dynasties have been created dukes of various provinces. Since 1772, these are only nominal titles, prince Gustaf Adolf Regional football in the province is administered by Västerbottens Fotbollförbund

2.
Language family
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A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestral language or parental language, called the proto-language of that family. Linguists therefore describe the languages within a language family as being genetically related. Estimates of the number of living languages vary from 5,000 to 8,000, depending on the precision of ones definition of language, the 2013 edition of Ethnologue catalogs just over 7,000 living human languages. A living language is one that is used as the primary form of communication of a group of people. There are also dead and extinct languages, as well as some that are still insufficiently studied to be classified. Membership of languages in a family is established by comparative linguistics. Sister languages are said to have a genetic or genealogical relationship, speakers of a language family belong to a common speech community. The divergence of a proto-language into daughter languages typically occurs through geographical separation, individuals belonging to other speech communities may also adopt languages from a different language family through the language shift process. Genealogically related languages present shared retentions, that is, features of the proto-language that cannot be explained by chance or borrowing, for example, Germanic languages are Germanic in that they share vocabulary and grammatical features that are not believed to have been present in the Proto-Indo-European language. These features are believed to be innovations that took place in Proto-Germanic, language families can be divided into smaller phylogenetic units, conventionally referred to as branches of the family because the history of a language family is often represented as a tree diagram. A family is a unit, all its members derive from a common ancestor. Some taxonomists restrict the term family to a level. Those who affix such labels also subdivide branches into groups, a top-level family is often called a phylum or stock. The closer the branches are to other, the closer the languages will be related. For example, the Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, Romance, there is a remarkably similar pattern shown by the linguistic tree and the genetic tree of human ancestry that was verified statistically. Languages interpreted in terms of the phylogenetic tree of human languages are transmitted to a great extent vertically as opposed to horizontally. A speech variety may also be considered either a language or a dialect depending on social or political considerations, thus, different sources give sometimes wildly different accounts of the number of languages within a family. Classifications of the Japonic family, for example, range from one language to nearly twenty, most of the worlds languages are known to be related to others

3.
Indo-European languages
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The Indo-European languages are a language family of several hundred related languages and dialects. There are about 445 living Indo-European languages, according to the estimate by Ethnologue, the most widely spoken Indo-European languages by native speakers are Spanish, English, Hindustani, Portuguese, Bengali, Russian, and Punjabi, each with over 100 million speakers. Today, 46% of the population speaks an Indo-European language as a first language. The Indo-European family includes most of the languages of Europe, and parts of Western, Central. It was also predominant in ancient Anatolia, the ancient Tarim Basin and most of Central Asia until the medieval Turkic migrations, all Indo-European languages are descendants of a single prehistoric language, reconstructed as Proto-Indo-European, spoken sometime in the Neolithic era. Several disputed proposals link Indo-European to other language families. In the 16th century, European visitors to the Indian subcontinent began to notice similarities among Indo-Aryan, Iranian, in 1583, English Jesuit missionary Thomas Stephens in Goa wrote a letter to his brother in which he noted similarities between Indian languages and Greek and Latin. Another account to mention the ancient language Sanskrit came from Filippo Sassetti, a merchant born in Florence in 1540, writing in 1585, he noted some word similarities between Sanskrit and Italian. However, neither Stephens nor Sassettis observations led to further scholarly inquiry and he included in his hypothesis Dutch, Albanian, Greek, Latin, Persian, and German, later adding Slavic, Celtic, and Baltic languages. However, Van Boxhorns suggestions did not become known and did not stimulate further research. Ottoman Turkish traveler Evliya Çelebi visited Vienna in 1665–1666 as part of a diplomatic mission, gaston Coeurdoux and others made observations of the same type. Coeurdoux made a comparison of Sanskrit, Latin and Greek conjugations in the late 1760s to suggest a relationship among them. Thomas Young first used the term Indo-European in 1813, deriving from the extremes of the language family. A synonym is Indo-Germanic, specifying the familys southeasternmost and northwesternmost branches, a number of other synonymous terms have also been used. Franz Bopps Comparative Grammar appeared between 1833 and 1852 and marks the beginning of Indo-European studies as an academic discipline, the classical phase of Indo-European comparative linguistics leads from this work to August Schleichers 1861 Compendium and up to Karl Brugmanns Grundriss, published in the 1880s. Brugmanns neogrammarian reevaluation of the field and Ferdinand de Saussures development of the theory may be considered the beginning of modern Indo-European studies. This led to the laryngeal theory, a major step forward in Indo-European linguistics. Isolated terms in Luwian/Hittite mentioned in Semitic Old Assyrian texts from the 20th and 19th centuries BC, Hittite texts from about 1650 BC, Armenian, writing known from the beginning of the 5th century AD

4.
Germanic languages
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It is the third most spoken Indo-European subdivision, behind Italic and Indo-Iranian, and ahead of Balto-Slavic languages. Limburgish varieties have roughly 1.3 million speakers along the Dutch–Belgian–German border, the main North Germanic languages are Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Icelandic, and Faroese, which have a combined total of about 20 million speakers. The East Germanic branch included Gothic, Burgundian, and Vandalic, the last to die off was Crimean Gothic, spoken in the late 18th century in some isolated areas of Crimea. The total number of Germanic languages throughout history is unknown, as some of them—especially East Germanic languages—disappeared during or after the Migration Period. Proto-Germanic, along all of its descendants, is characterized by a number of unique linguistic features. Early varieties of Germanic enter history with the Germanic tribes moving south from Scandinavia in the 2nd century BC, to settle in the area of todays northern Germany, furthermore, it is the de facto language of the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia. It is also a language in Nicaragua and Malaysia. German is a language of Austria, Belgium, Germany, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg and Switzerland and has regional status in Italy, Poland, Namibia. German also continues to be spoken as a minority language by immigrant communities in North America, South America, Central America, Mexico, a German dialect, Pennsylvania Dutch, is still present amongst Anabaptist populations in Pennsylvania in the United States. Dutch is a language of Aruba, Belgium, Curaçao. The Netherlands also colonised Indonesia, but Dutch was scrapped as a language after Indonesian independence. Dutch was until 1925 an official language in South Africa, but evolved in and was replaced by Afrikaans, Afrikaans is one of the 11 official languages in South Africa and is a lingua franca of Namibia. It is used in other Southern African nations as well, low German is a collection of sometimes very diverse dialects spoken in the northeast of the Netherlands and northern Germany. Scots is spoken in Lowland Scotland and parts of Ulster, frisian is spoken among half a million people who live on the southern fringes of the North Sea in the Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark. Luxembourgish is mainly spoken in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, though it extends into small parts of Belgium, France. Limburgish varieties are spoken in the Limburg and Rhineland regions, along the Dutch–Belgian–German border, Swedish is also one of the two official languages in Finland, along with Finnish, and the only official language in the Åland Islands. Danish is also spoken natively by the Danish minority in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, Norwegian is the official language of Norway. Icelandic is the language of Iceland, and is spoken by a significant minority in the Faroe Islands

5.
North Germanic languages
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The language group is sometimes referred to as the Nordic languages, a direct translation of the most common term used among Danish, Swedish and Norwegian scholars and laypeople. Approximately 20 million people in the Nordic countries have a Scandinavian language as their native language, languages belonging to the North Germanic language tree are spoken commonly on Greenland and, to a lesser extent, by immigrants in North America. Dialects with the assigned to the northern group formed from the Proto-Germanic language in the late Pre-Roman Iron Age in Northern Europe. At last around the year 200 AD, speakers of the North Germanic branch became distinguishable from the other Germanic language speakers, the early development of this language branch is attested through runic inscriptions. The original vowel remained when nasalised *ōn and when before /z/, Proto-Germanic *geƀō ‘gift’ > Northwest Germanic *geƀu >, North Germanic *gjavu > with u-umlaut *gjǫvu > ON gjǫf, and West Germanic *gebu > OE giefu, cf. Goth giba. Proto-Germanic *tungōn ‘tongue’ > late Northwest Germanic *tungā > *tunga > ON tunga, OHG zunga, OE tunge, vs. Goth tuggō. *geƀōz ‘of a gift’ > late Northwest Germanic *geƀāz >, North Germanic *gjavaz > ON gjafar, the rhotacism of /z/ to /r/, with presumably a rhotic fricative of some kind as an earlier stage. This change probably affected West Germanic much earlier and then spread from there to North Germanic and this is confirmed by an intermediate stage ʀ, clearly attested in late runic East Norse at a time when West Germanic had long merged the sound with /r/. The development of the demonstrative pronoun ancestral to English this, Germanic *sa, sō, þat ‘this, that’ + proximal *si ‘here’, Runic Norse, nom. sg. þeim-si, etc. with declension of the 1st part, fixed form with declension on the 2nd part, ON sjá, þessi m. Some innovations are not found in West and East Germanic such as, Sharpening of geminate /jj/ and /ww/ according to Holtzmanns law Occurred also in East Germanic, Proto-Germanic *twajjôN > Old Norse tveggja, Gothic twaddjē, but > Old High German zweiio Word-final devoicing of stop consonants. Proto-Germanic *nahtuN > *nāttu > *nǭttu > Old Norse nótt /ɑi̯/ > /ɑː/ before /r/ Proto-Germanic *sairaz > *sāraz > *sārz > Old Norse sárr, with original /z/ Proto-Germanic *gaizaz > *geizz > Old Norse geirr. General loss of word-final /n/, following the loss of short vowels. Proto-Germanic *bindanaN > *bindan > Old Norse binda, but > Old English bindan and this also affected stressed syllables, Proto-Germanic *in > Old Norse í Vowel breaking of /e/ to /jɑ/ except after w, j or l. The diphthong /eu/ was also affected, shifting to /jɒu/ at an early stage and this diphthong is preserved in Old Gutnish and survives in modern Gutnish. In other Norse dialects, the /j/-onset and length remained, the word *ek, which could occur both stressed and unstressed, appears varyingly as ek and jak throughout Old Norse. Loss of initial /j/, and also of /w/ before a round vowel, Proto-Germanic *wulfaz > North Germanic ulfz > Old Norse ulfr The development of u-umlaut, which rounded stressed vowels when /u/ or /w/ followed in the next syllable. This followed vowel breaking, with ja /jɑ/ being u-umlauted to jǫ /jɒ/, Norwegian settlers brought Old West Norse to Iceland and the Faroe Islands around 800

6.
Swedish language
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Swedish is a North Germanic language, spoken natively by more than 9 million people predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, where it has equal legal standing with Finnish. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish, along with the other North Germanic languages, Swedish is a descendant of Old Norse, the common language of the Germanic peoples living in Scandinavia during the Viking Era. It is currently the largest of the North Germanic languages by number of speakers, Standard Swedish, spoken by most Swedes, is the national language that evolved from the Central Swedish dialects in the 19th century and was well established by the beginning of the 20th century. While distinct regional varieties descended from the rural dialects still exist. The standard word order is, as in most Germanic languages, V2, Swedish morphology is similar to English, that is, words have comparatively few inflections. There are two genders, no cases, and a distinction between plural and singular. Older analyses posit the cases nominative and genitive and there are remains of distinct accusative and dative forms as well. Adjectives are compared as in English, and are inflected according to gender, number. The definiteness of nouns is marked primarily through suffixes, complemented with separate definite and indefinite articles, the prosody features both stress and in most dialects tonal qualities. The language has a large vowel inventory. Swedish is also notable for the voiceless velar fricative, a highly variable consonant phoneme. Swedish is an Indo-European language belonging to the North Germanic branch of the Germanic languages, by many general criteria of mutual intelligibility, the Continental Scandinavian languages could very well be considered dialects of a common Scandinavian language. In the 8th century, the common Germanic language of Scandinavia, Proto-Norse, had some changes. This language began to undergo new changes that did not spread to all of Scandinavia, the dialects of Old East Norse that were spoken in Sweden are called Runic Swedish while the dialects of Denmark are referred to as Runic Danish. The dialects are described as runic because the body of text appears in the runic alphabet. Unlike Proto-Norse, which was written with the Elder Futhark alphabet, Old Norse was written with the Younger Futhark alphabet, from 1200 onwards, the dialects in Denmark began to diverge from those of Sweden. An early change that separated Runic Danish from the dialects of Old East Norse was the change of the diphthong æi to the monophthong é. This is reflected in runic inscriptions where the older read stain, there was also a change of au as in dauðr into a long open ø as in døðr dead

7.
Norrland dialects
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Norrland dialects is one of the six major dialect groupings of the Swedish language. It comprises the dialects in most of Norrland, except those of Gästrikland and southern Hälsingland, the old northern border of the Swedish language in coastal Norrbotten largely followed the eastern and northern borders of Lower and Upper Kalix parishes in modern Kalix Municipality. Norrland dialects arose from the influence of the Old West Norse spoken in Trøndelag to the west. The westerly influences were strong in the centuries leading up to the Viking Era. The shift to East Norse progressed through the Middle Ages, as Norrland gradually came to be more and more under Central Swedish influence in the Modern Era, many of the older West Norse characteristics disappeared. The strong West Norse influences can still be today in the toponymy of Norrland in placenames ending in -ånger. Parish names such Skön and Indal have West Nordic origins, the dialect of Norrbotten displays less West Nordic influence than other more westerly dialects. The greatest West Nordic/Norwegian—or, perhaps, least East Nordic/Swedish—influence is found in Jamtlandic, as with other regiolects, it is difficult to clearly define a unique set of characteristics for the Norrland dialects. The distribution of different features of the dialect have differing boundaries, vowel balance Words that were long-spelled in Old Swedish developed weakened or dropped end-vowels. Examples of words with weakened end-vowels are kastä and backä, in dialects such as those of Jämtland and Västerbotten, where the end-vowels are dropped, these words become kaast and baack. Words that were short-spelled have, however, conserved the original end-vowel length, vowel balance is also an important distinctive feature in the East Norwegian dialects. End-vowel development in words has been dependent on the length since the time of Old Swedish. This characteristic is known as vowel balance, the dialect of Medelpad is the southernmost of the coastal dialects which has vowel balance. In the Hälsing dialect, the endings are as in Standard Swedish, kasta, vowel balance is particularly evident in the definite plural of nouns, Standard Swedish hästarna is in certain northern dialects hästa, while dagarna is dagana. All of the Sami languages, particularly East Sami, have had similar systems of vowel balance since long before any Nordic languages were spoken in north Scandinavia, smoothing Words that were originally short-spelled have often undergone a process of assimilation of the stem-vowel and ending. Examples include färä and vuku, firi and skyri and this phenomenon, known as smoothing, is found predominantly in the dialects from upper Dalarna and Trøndelag northward. A and thick L The Old Swedish a before the consonant cluster rð has been preserved, while rð itself became a retroflex flap and this is sometimes represented as a capital L, to differentiate it from the Standard Swedish rd cluster. Examples of this thick L include svaL and aL and this phenomenon is shared with the Dalecarlian dialects and Norwegian, as well as the Swedish dialects in Ostrobothnia

8.
Writing system
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A writing system is any conventional method of visually representing verbal communication. While both writing and speech are useful in conveying messages, writing differs in also being a form of information storage. The processes of encoding and decoding writing systems involve shared understanding between writers and readers of the meaning behind the sets of characters that make up a script, the general attributes of writing systems can be placed into broad categories such as alphabets, syllabaries, or logographies. Any particular system can have attributes of more than one category, in the alphabetic category, there is a standard set of letters of consonants and vowels that encode based on the general principle that the letters represent speech sounds. In a syllabary, each symbol correlates to a syllable or mora, in a logography, each character represents a word, morpheme, or other semantic units. Other categories include abjads, which differ from alphabets in that vowels are not indicated, alphabets typically use a set of 20-to-35 symbols to fully express a language, whereas syllabaries can have 80-to-100, and logographies can have several hundreds of symbols. Systems will also enable the stringing together of these groupings in order to enable a full expression of the language. The reading step can be accomplished purely in the mind as an internal process, writing systems were preceded by proto-writing, which used pictograms, ideograms and other mnemonic symbols. Proto-writing lacked the ability to capture and express a range of thoughts. Soon after, writing provided a form of long distance communication. With the advent of publishing, it provided the medium for a form of mass communication. Writing systems are distinguished from other possible symbolic communication systems in that a system is always associated with at least one spoken language. In contrast, visual representations such as drawings, paintings, and non-verbal items on maps, such as contour lines, are not language-related. Some other symbols, such as numerals and the ampersand, are not directly linked to any specific language, every human community possesses language, which many regard as an innate and defining condition of humanity. However, the development of writing systems, and the process by which they have supplanted traditional oral systems of communication, have been sporadic, uneven, once established, writing systems generally change more slowly than their spoken counterparts. Thus they often preserve features and expressions which are no current in the spoken language. One of the benefits of writing systems is that they can preserve a permanent record of information expressed in a language. In the examination of individual scripts, the study of writing systems has developed along partially independent lines, thus, the terminology employed differs somewhat from field to field

9.
Latin script
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Latin script is used as the standard method of writing in most Western and Central European languages, as well as in many languages in other parts of the world. Latin script is the basis for the largest number of alphabets of any writing system and is the most widely adopted writing system in the world, Latin script is also the basis of the International Phonetic Alphabet. The 26 most widespread letters are the contained in the ISO basic Latin alphabet. The script is either called Roman script or Latin script, in reference to its origin in ancient Rome, in the context of transliteration, the term romanization or romanisation is often found. Unicode uses the term Latin as does the International Organization for Standardization, the numeral system is called the Roman numeral system, and the collection of the elements, Roman numerals. The numbers 1,2,3. are Latin/Roman script numbers for the Hindu–Arabic numeral system, the Latin alphabet spread, along with Latin, from the Italian Peninsula to the lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea with the expansion of the Roman Empire. The Latin script also came into use for writing the West Slavic languages and several South Slavic languages, the speakers of East Slavic languages generally adopted Cyrillic along with Orthodox Christianity. The Serbian language uses both scripts, with Cyrillic predominating in official communication and Latin elsewhere, as determined by the Law on Official Use of the Language and Alphabet. As late as 1500, the Latin script was limited primarily to the languages spoken in Western, Northern, the Orthodox Christian Slavs of Eastern and Southeastern Europe mostly used Cyrillic, and the Greek alphabet was in use by Greek-speakers around the eastern Mediterranean. The Arabic script was widespread within Islam, both among Arabs and non-Arab nations like the Iranians, Indonesians, Malays, and Turkic peoples, most of the rest of Asia used a variety of Brahmic alphabets or the Chinese script. It is used for many Austronesian languages, including the languages of the Philippines, Latin letters served as the basis for the forms of the Cherokee syllabary developed by Sequoyah, however, the sound values are completely different. In the late 19th century, the Romanians returned to the Latin alphabet, under French rule and Portuguese missionary influence, a Latin alphabet was devised for the Vietnamese language, which had previously used Chinese characters. In 1928, as part of Mustafa Kemal Atatürks reforms, the new Republic of Turkey adopted a Latin alphabet for the Turkish language, kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Iranian-speaking Tajikistan, and the breakaway region of Transnistria kept the Cyrillic alphabet, chiefly due to their close ties with Russia. In the 1930s and 1940s, the majority of Kurds replaced the Arabic script with two Latin alphabets, although the only official Kurdish government uses an Arabic alphabet for public documents, the Latin Kurdish alphabet remains widely used throughout the region by the majority of Kurdish-speakers. In 2015, the Kazakh government announced that the Latin alphabet would replace Cyrillic as the system for the Kazakh language by 2025. In the course of its use, the Latin alphabet was adapted for use in new languages, sometimes representing phonemes not found in languages that were written with the Roman characters. These new forms are given a place in the alphabet by defining an alphabetical order or collation sequence, a digraph is a pair of letters used to write one sound or a combination of sounds that does not correspond to the written letters in sequence. Examples are ⟨ch⟩, ⟨ng⟩, ⟨rh⟩, ⟨sh⟩ in English, a trigraph is made up of three letters, like the German ⟨sch⟩, the Breton ⟨c’h⟩ or the Milanese ⟨oeu⟩

10.
International Phonetic Alphabet
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The International Phonetic Alphabet is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin alphabet. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association as a representation of the sounds of spoken language. The IPA is used by lexicographers, foreign students and teachers, linguists, speech-language pathologists, singers, actors, constructed language creators. The IPA is designed to represent only those qualities of speech that are part of language, phones, phonemes, intonation. IPA symbols are composed of one or more elements of two types, letters and diacritics. For example, the sound of the English letter ⟨t⟩ may be transcribed in IPA with a letter, or with a letter plus diacritics. Often, slashes are used to signal broad or phonemic transcription, thus, /t/ is less specific than, occasionally letters or diacritics are added, removed, or modified by the International Phonetic Association. As of the most recent change in 2005, there are 107 letters,52 diacritics and these are shown in the current IPA chart, posted below in this article and at the website of the IPA. In 1886, a group of French and British language teachers, led by the French linguist Paul Passy, for example, the sound was originally represented with the letter ⟨c⟩ in English, but with the digraph ⟨ch⟩ in French. However, in 1888, the alphabet was revised so as to be uniform across languages, the idea of making the IPA was first suggested by Otto Jespersen in a letter to Paul Passy. It was developed by Alexander John Ellis, Henry Sweet, Daniel Jones, since its creation, the IPA has undergone a number of revisions. After major revisions and expansions in 1900 and 1932, the IPA remained unchanged until the International Phonetic Association Kiel Convention in 1989, a minor revision took place in 1993 with the addition of four letters for mid central vowels and the removal of letters for voiceless implosives. The alphabet was last revised in May 2005 with the addition of a letter for a labiodental flap, apart from the addition and removal of symbols, changes to the IPA have consisted largely in renaming symbols and categories and in modifying typefaces. Extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet for speech pathology were created in 1990, the general principle of the IPA is to provide one letter for each distinctive sound, although this practice is not followed if the sound itself is complex. There are no letters that have context-dependent sound values, as do hard, finally, the IPA does not usually have separate letters for two sounds if no known language makes a distinction between them, a property known as selectiveness. These are organized into a chart, the chart displayed here is the chart as posted at the website of the IPA. The letters chosen for the IPA are meant to harmonize with the Latin alphabet, for this reason, most letters are either Latin or Greek, or modifications thereof. Some letters are neither, for example, the letter denoting the glottal stop, ⟨ʔ⟩, has the form of a question mark

11.
Specials (Unicode block)
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Specials is a short Unicode block allocated at the very end of the Basic Multilingual Plane, at U+FFF0–FFFF. Of these 16 codepoints, five are assigned as of Unicode 9, U+FFFD � REPLACEMENT CHARACTER used to replace an unknown, unrecognized or unrepresentable character U+FFFE <noncharacter-FFFE> not a character. FFFE and FFFF are not unassigned in the sense. They can be used to guess a texts encoding scheme, since any text containing these is by not a correctly encoded Unicode text. The replacement character � is a found in the Unicode standard at codepoint U+FFFD in the Specials table. It is used to indicate problems when a system is unable to render a stream of data to a correct symbol and it is usually seen when the data is invalid and does not match any character, Consider a text file containing the German word für in the ISO-8859-1 encoding. This file is now opened with an editor that assumes the input is UTF-8. The first and last byte are valid UTF-8 encodings of ASCII, therefore, a text editor could replace this byte with the replacement character symbol to produce a valid string of Unicode code points. The whole string now displays like this, f�r, a poorly implemented text editor might save the replacement in UTF-8 form, the text file data will then look like this, 0x66 0xEF 0xBF 0xBD 0x72, which will be displayed in ISO-8859-1 as fï¿½r. Since the replacement is the same for all errors this makes it impossible to recover the original character, a better design is to preserve the original bytes, including the error, and only convert to the replacement when displaying the text. This will allow the text editor to save the original byte sequence and it has become increasingly common for software to interpret invalid UTF-8 by guessing the bytes are in another byte-based encoding such as ISO-8859-1. This allows correct display of both valid and invalid UTF-8 pasted together, Unicode control characters UTF-8 Mojibake Unicodes Specials table Decodeunicodes entry for the replacement character

12.
Unicode
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Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the worlds writing systems. As of June 2016, the most recent version is Unicode 9.0, the standard is maintained by the Unicode Consortium. Unicodes success at unifying character sets has led to its widespread, the standard has been implemented in many recent technologies, including modern operating systems, XML, Java, and the. NET Framework. Unicode can be implemented by different character encodings, the most commonly used encodings are UTF-8, UTF-16 and the now-obsolete UCS-2. UTF-8 uses one byte for any ASCII character, all of which have the same values in both UTF-8 and ASCII encoding, and up to four bytes for other characters. UCS-2 uses a 16-bit code unit for each character but cannot encode every character in the current Unicode standard, UTF-16 extends UCS-2, using one 16-bit unit for the characters that were representable in UCS-2 and two 16-bit units to handle each of the additional characters. Many traditional character encodings share a common problem in that they allow bilingual computer processing, Unicode, in intent, encodes the underlying characters—graphemes and grapheme-like units—rather than the variant glyphs for such characters. In the case of Chinese characters, this leads to controversies over distinguishing the underlying character from its variant glyphs. In text processing, Unicode takes the role of providing a unique code point—a number, in other words, Unicode represents a character in an abstract way and leaves the visual rendering to other software, such as a web browser or word processor. This simple aim becomes complicated, however, because of concessions made by Unicodes designers in the hope of encouraging a more rapid adoption of Unicode, the first 256 code points were made identical to the content of ISO-8859-1 so as to make it trivial to convert existing western text. For other examples, see duplicate characters in Unicode and he explained that he name Unicode is intended to suggest a unique, unified, universal encoding. In this document, entitled Unicode 88, Becker outlined a 16-bit character model, Unicode could be roughly described as wide-body ASCII that has been stretched to 16 bits to encompass the characters of all the worlds living languages. In a properly engineered design,16 bits per character are more than sufficient for this purpose, Unicode aims in the first instance at the characters published in modern text, whose number is undoubtedly far below 214 =16,384. By the end of 1990, most of the work on mapping existing character encoding standards had been completed, the Unicode Consortium was incorporated in California on January 3,1991, and in October 1991, the first volume of the Unicode standard was published. The second volume, covering Han ideographs, was published in June 1992, in 1996, a surrogate character mechanism was implemented in Unicode 2.0, so that Unicode was no longer restricted to 16 bits. The Microsoft TrueType specification version 1.0 from 1992 used the name Apple Unicode instead of Unicode for the Platform ID in the naming table, Unicode defines a codespace of 1,114,112 code points in the range 0hex to 10FFFFhex. Normally a Unicode code point is referred to by writing U+ followed by its hexadecimal number, for code points in the Basic Multilingual Plane, four digits are used, for code points outside the BMP, five or six digits are used, as required. Code points in Planes 1 through 16 are accessed as surrogate pairs in UTF-16, within each plane, characters are allocated within named blocks of related characters

13.
Scandinavian languages
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The language group is sometimes referred to as the Nordic languages, a direct translation of the most common term used among Danish, Swedish and Norwegian scholars and laypeople. Approximately 20 million people in the Nordic countries have a Scandinavian language as their native language, languages belonging to the North Germanic language tree are spoken commonly on Greenland and, to a lesser extent, by immigrants in North America. Dialects with the assigned to the northern group formed from the Proto-Germanic language in the late Pre-Roman Iron Age in Northern Europe. At last around the year 200 AD, speakers of the North Germanic branch became distinguishable from the other Germanic language speakers, the early development of this language branch is attested through runic inscriptions. The original vowel remained when nasalised *ōn and when before /z/, Proto-Germanic *geƀō ‘gift’ > Northwest Germanic *geƀu >, North Germanic *gjavu > with u-umlaut *gjǫvu > ON gjǫf, and West Germanic *gebu > OE giefu, cf. Goth giba. Proto-Germanic *tungōn ‘tongue’ > late Northwest Germanic *tungā > *tunga > ON tunga, OHG zunga, OE tunge, vs. Goth tuggō. *geƀōz ‘of a gift’ > late Northwest Germanic *geƀāz >, North Germanic *gjavaz > ON gjafar, the rhotacism of /z/ to /r/, with presumably a rhotic fricative of some kind as an earlier stage. This change probably affected West Germanic much earlier and then spread from there to North Germanic and this is confirmed by an intermediate stage ʀ, clearly attested in late runic East Norse at a time when West Germanic had long merged the sound with /r/. The development of the demonstrative pronoun ancestral to English this, Germanic *sa, sō, þat ‘this, that’ + proximal *si ‘here’, Runic Norse, nom. sg. þeim-si, etc. with declension of the 1st part, fixed form with declension on the 2nd part, ON sjá, þessi m. Some innovations are not found in West and East Germanic such as, Sharpening of geminate /jj/ and /ww/ according to Holtzmanns law Occurred also in East Germanic, Proto-Germanic *twajjôN > Old Norse tveggja, Gothic twaddjē, but > Old High German zweiio Word-final devoicing of stop consonants. Proto-Germanic *nahtuN > *nāttu > *nǭttu > Old Norse nótt /ɑi̯/ > /ɑː/ before /r/ Proto-Germanic *sairaz > *sāraz > *sārz > Old Norse sárr, with original /z/ Proto-Germanic *gaizaz > *geizz > Old Norse geirr. General loss of word-final /n/, following the loss of short vowels. Proto-Germanic *bindanaN > *bindan > Old Norse binda, but > Old English bindan and this also affected stressed syllables, Proto-Germanic *in > Old Norse í Vowel breaking of /e/ to /jɑ/ except after w, j or l. The diphthong /eu/ was also affected, shifting to /jɒu/ at an early stage and this diphthong is preserved in Old Gutnish and survives in modern Gutnish. In other Norse dialects, the /j/-onset and length remained, the word *ek, which could occur both stressed and unstressed, appears varyingly as ek and jak throughout Old Norse. Loss of initial /j/, and also of /w/ before a round vowel, Proto-Germanic *wulfaz > North Germanic ulfz > Old Norse ulfr The development of u-umlaut, which rounded stressed vowels when /u/ or /w/ followed in the next syllable. This followed vowel breaking, with ja /jɑ/ being u-umlauted to jǫ /jɒ/, Norwegian settlers brought Old West Norse to Iceland and the Faroe Islands around 800

14.
Lapland (Sweden)
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Lappland, often Anglicized as Lapland, is a province in northernmost Sweden. It borders Jämtland, Ångermanland, Västerbotten, Norrbotten, Norway, about a quarter of Swedens surface area is in Lappland. The traditional provinces of Sweden serve no administrative or political purposes but are cultural and historical entities, administratively, Lappland constitutes the western part of two counties of Sweden, Norrbotten County in the north and Västerbotten County in the south. In contrast to most other areas of Sweden, there is more of an identification with the rather than to provinces. Thus, most people in these counties refer to the county, including the areas in Lappland. Citizens of Sami descent are eligible to stand and vote in elections for the Swedish Sami Parliament, Sami language has an official minority status in Kiruna Municipality, Gällivare Municipality, Jokkmokk Municipality and Arjeplog Municipality. As of January 1,2016, the population of Swedish Lappland is 96,3045, together with the rest of historical Lapland, the sum of the population is approximately 125,000. The largest city is Kiruna with 23,178 inhabitants, blazon Swedish version, Argent, a Wildman statant Gules wrapped with birch leaves Vert on the head and around the waist holding a Club Or in dexter over the shoulder. The wildman used to be depicted with more features, impressively drawn muscles, the wildman wielding a club as heraldic symbol of Lappland first appeared at the coronation of Charles IX of Sweden in 1607, then at the same kings burial in 1611. The colour red of his skin was decided only in 1949, the wildman, though unusual in heraldry, is an old symbol of the uncivilized north and appeared in books and woodcuts of the 16th century. Lapland is known for containing the Vindelfjällen Nature Reserve, one of the largest nature reserves in Sweden, Lappland has an area of 109,702 square km, almost equal to Portugal. The southern parts of the province is significantly milder than the northern, however, since Lappland is all made up of inland areas, maritime moderation is less significant than in the counties coastal areas and in neighbouring Norway, resulting in harsh winters. Southern areas at a lower elevation such as Lycksele also have relatively warm summers, due to the arctic circle, the northern areas of the province experience midnight sun and a moderate polar night with some civil twilight during opposite sides of the year. The history of Lappland is in many ways connected to the history of Norrbotten County and Västerbotten County, during the Middle Ages, Norrbotten/Lappland was considered a no mans land. The area was in fact populated by nomadic Sami people, but the region became increasingly settled by Swedish, Finnish and Norwegian settlers - especially along the coasts and large rivers. From the Middle Ages on, the Swedish kings tried to colonise and Christianise the area using settlers from what is now Finland, today, despite large-scale assimilation into the dominant Swedish culture, Finnish and Sami minorities continue to maintain their cultures and identities. In religion, nonetheless, in the 17th and 18th centuries the Lapplanders generally left their original shamanism, since the 19th century, Lappland has been particularly characterised by Laestadian Lutheranism. During the industrialisation of Sweden, natural resources from Lappland and surrounding provinces played a key role, still, mining, forestry and hydroelectric power are the backbone of the local economy, together with municipal services

15.
Proto-Norse language
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Proto-Norse, was an Indo-European language spoken in Scandinavia that is thought to have evolved as a northern dialect of Proto-Germanic over the first centuries CE. It is the earliest stage of a characteristically North Germanic language, and it evolved into the dialects of the Old Norse language, at the beginning of the Viking Age about AD800, which later themselves evolved into modern North Germanic languages. Proto-Norse phonology probably did not differ substantially from that of Proto-Germanic, although the phonetic realisation of several phonemes had probably changed over time, the overall system of phonemes and their distribution remained largely unchanged. /n/ assimilated to a velar consonant. It was before a velar, and probably before a labial-velar consonant. Unlike its Proto-Germanic ancestor /x/, the phoneme /h/ was probably no longer a fricative and it eventually disappeared except word-initially. and were allophones of /b/, /d/ and /ɡ/, and occurred in most word-medial positions. Plosives appeared when the consonants were lengthened, and also after a nasal consonant, word-finally, and were devoiced and merged with /p/, /t/, /k/. The exact realisation of the phoneme /z/, traditionally written as ʀ in transcriptions of runic Norse, is unclear, while it was a simple alveolar sibilant in Proto-Germanic, it eventually underwent rhotacization and merged with /r/ towards the end of the runic period. It may have been pronounced as or, tending towards a trill in the later period, the sound was still written with its own letter in runic Old East Norse around the end of the millennium. The system of vowels differed somewhat more from that of Proto-Germanic than the consonants, earlier /ɛː/ had been lowered to /ɑː/, and unstressed /ai/ and /au/ had developed into /eː/ and /ɔː/. Shortening of word-final vowels had eliminated the Proto-Germanic overlong vowels, /o/ had developed from /u/ through a-mutation. It also occurred word-finally as a result of the shortening of Proto-Germanic /ɔː/, the long nasal vowels /ɑ̃ː/, /ĩː/ and /ũː/ occurred only before /h/. Their presence was noted in the 12th century First Grammatical Treatise, all other nasal vowels occurred only word-finally, although it is unclear whether they had retained their nasality in Proto-Norse or had already merged with the oral vowels. The vowels /o/ and /ɔ̃/ were contrastive, however, as the former eventually developed into /u/ while the latter was lowered to /ɑ/, towards the end of the Proto-Norse period, stressed /e/ underwent breaking, becoming a rising diphthong /ja/. Also towards the end of the Proto-Norse period, u-mutation began to take effect, at least the following diphthongs were present, /æi/, /ɑu/, /eu/, /iu/. /ɑu/ was later rounded to /ɒu/ due to u-mutation, /eu/ eventually underwent breaking to become the triphthong /jɒu/. This was preserved in Old Gutnish, but simplified to a long rising /joː/ or /juː/ in other areas, as /iu/ occurred exclusively in environments with i-mutation, its realisation was probably fronted. This then developed further into, which then became /yː/, Old Norse had a stress accent which fell on the first syllable

16.
Old Norse
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Old Norse was a North Germanic language that was spoken by inhabitants of Scandinavia and inhabitants of their overseas settlements during about the 9th to 13th centuries. These dates, however, are not absolute, since written Old Norse is found well into the 15th century, Old Norse was divided into three dialects, Old West Norse, Old East Norse and Old Gutnish. Old West and East Norse formed a continuum, with no clear geographical boundary between them. For example, Old East Norse traits were found in eastern Norway, although Old Norwegian is classified as Old West Norse, most speakers spoke Old East Norse in what is present day Denmark and Sweden. Old Gutnish, the more obscure dialectal branch, is included in the Old East Norse dialect due to geographical associations. It developed its own features and shared in changes to both other branches. The 12th century Icelandic Gray Goose Laws state that Swedes, Norwegians, Icelanders and Danes spoke the same language, another term used, used especially commonly with reference to West Norse, was norrœnt mál. In some instances the term Old Norse refers specifically to Old West Norse, the Old East Norse dialect was spoken in Denmark, Sweden, settlements in Kievan Rus, eastern England, and Danish settlements in Normandy. The Old Gutnish dialect was spoken in Gotland and in settlements in the East. In the 11th century, Old Norse was the most widely spoken European language, in Kievan Rus, it survived the longest in Veliky Novgorod, probably lasting into the 13th century there. Norwegian is descended from Old West Norse, but over the centuries it has heavily influenced by East Norse. Old Norse also had an influence on English dialects and Lowland Scots and it also influenced the development of the Norman language, and through it and to a smaller extent, that of modern French. Various other languages, which are not closely related, have heavily influenced by Norse, particularly the Norman dialects, Scottish Gaelic. The current Finnish and Estonian words for Sweden are Ruotsi and Rootsi, of the modern languages, Icelandic is the closest to Old Norse. Written modern Icelandic derives from the Old Norse phonemic writing system, contemporary Icelandic-speakers can read Old Norse, which varies slightly in spelling as well as semantics and word order. However, pronunciation, particularly of the phonemes, has changed at least as much as in the other North Germanic languages. Faroese retains many similarities but is influenced by Danish, Norwegian, although Swedish, Danish and the Norwegian languages have diverged the most, they still retain asymmetric mutual intelligibility. Speakers of modern Swedish, Norwegian and Danish can mostly understand each other without studying their neighboring languages, the languages are also sufficiently similar in writing that they can mostly be understood across borders

17.
Viking Age
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The Viking Age is the period from the late 8th century to the mid-11th century in European history, especially Northern European and Scandinavian history, following the Germanic Iron Age. It is the period of history when Scandinavian Norsemen explored Europe by its seas and rivers for trade, raids, colonisation and conquest. Three Viking ships had beached in Weymouth Bay four years earlier, the Viking devastation of Northumbrias Holy Island was reported by the Northumbrian scholar Alcuin of York, who wrote, Never before in Britain has such a terror appeared. Vikings were portrayed as violent and bloodthirsty by their enemies. The chronicles of medieval England portrayed them as rapacious wolves among sheep, the first challenges to the many anti-Viking images in Britain emerged in the 17th century. Pioneering scholarly works on the Viking Age reached a readership in Britain. Archaeologists began to dig up Britains Viking past, linguistics traced the Viking-Age origins of rural idioms and proverbs. New dictionaries of the Old Norse language enabled more Victorians to read the Icelandic Sagas, the Vikings who invaded western and eastern Europe were chiefly pagans from Denmark, Norway and Sweden. They also settled in the Faroe Islands, Ireland, Iceland, peripheral Scotland, Greenland and their North Germanic language, Old Norse, became the mother-tongue of present-day Scandinavian languages. By 801, a central authority appears to have been established in Jutland. In Norway, mountainous terrain and fjords formed strong natural boundaries, communities there remained independent of each other, unlike the situation in Denmark which is lowland. By 800, some 30 small kingdoms existed in Norway, the sea was the easiest way of communication between the Norwegian kingdoms and the outside world. It was in the 8th century that Scandinavians began to build ships of war, the North Sea rovers were traders, colonisers and explorers as well as plunderers. There are various theories concerning the causes of the Viking invasions, for people living along the coast, it would seem natural to seek new land by the sea. Another reason was that during this period England, Wales and Ireland, the Franks, however, had well-defended coasts and heavily fortified ports and harbours. Pure thirst for adventure may also have been a factor, a reason for the raids is believed by some to be over-population caused by technological advances, such as the use of iron, or a shortage of women due to selective female infanticide. Although another cause could well have been caused by the Frankish expansion to the south of Scandinavia. Consequently, these Vikings became raiders, in search of subsistence, There is ongoing debate among scholars as to why the Scandinavians began to expand during the 8th through 11th centuries

18.
Bronze Age
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The Bronze Age is a historical period characterized by the use of bronze, proto-writing, and other early features of urban civilization. The Bronze Age is the principal period of the three-age Stone-Bronze-Iron system, as proposed in modern times by Christian Jürgensen Thomsen. An ancient civilization is defined to be in the Bronze Age either by smelting its own copper and alloying with tin, arsenic, or other metals, or by trading for bronze from production areas elsewhere. Copper-tin ores are rare, as reflected in the fact there were no tin bronzes in Western Asia before trading in bronze began in the third millennium BC. Worldwide, the Bronze Age generally followed the Neolithic period, with the Chalcolithic serving as a transition, although the Iron Age generally followed the Bronze Age, in some areas, the Iron Age intruded directly on the Neolithic. Bronze Age cultures differed in their development of the first writing, according to archaeological evidence, cultures in Mesopotamia and Egypt developed the earliest viable writing systems. The overall period is characterized by use of bronze, though the place and time of the introduction. Human-made tin bronze technology requires set production techniques, tin must be mined and smelted separately, then added to molten copper to make bronze alloy. The Bronze Age was a time of use of metals. The dating of the foil has been disputed, the Bronze Age in the ancient Near East began with the rise of Sumer in the 4th millennium BC. Societies in the region laid the foundations for astronomy and mathematics, the usual tripartite division into an Early, Middle and Late Bronze Age is not used. Instead, a division based on art-historical and historical characteristics is more common. The cities of the Ancient Near East housed several tens of thousands of people, ur in the Middle Bronze Age and Babylon in the Late Bronze Age similarly had large populations. The earliest mention of Babylonia appears on a tablet from the reign of Sargon of Akkad in the 23rd century BC, the Amorite dynasty established the city-state of Babylon in the 19th century BC. Over 100 years later, it took over the other city-states. Babylonia adopted the written Semitic Akkadian language for official use, by that time, the Sumerian language was no longer spoken, but was still in religious use. Elam was an ancient civilization located to the east of Mesopotamia, in the Old Elamite period, Elam consisted of kingdoms on the Iranian plateau, centered in Anshan, and from the mid-2nd millennium BC, it was centered in Susa in the Khuzestan lowlands. Its culture played a role in the Gutian Empire and especially during the Achaemenid dynasty that succeeded it

19.
Sami people
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The Sami people are an indigenous Finno-Ugric people inhabiting the Arctic area of Sápmi, which today encompasses parts of far northern Norway, Sweden, Finland, and the Kola Peninsula of Russia. The Sami are the indigenous people of Scandinavia recognized and protected under the international conventions of indigenous peoples. Sami ancestral lands are not well-defined and their traditional languages are the Sami languages and are classified as a branch of the Uralic language family. Traditionally, the Sami have pursued a variety of livelihoods, including fishing, fur trapping. Their best-known means of livelihood is semi-nomadic reindeer herding, currently about 10% of the Sami are connected to reindeer herding, providing them with meat, fur, and transportation. 2,800 Sami people are involved in herding on a full-time basis. For traditional, environmental, cultural, and political reasons, reindeer herding is legally reserved only for Sami people in regions of the Nordic countries. The Sámi are often known in other languages by the exonyms Lap, Lapp, some Sami regard these as pejorative terms, while others do not. Finn was the originally used by Norse speakers to refer to the Sami, as attested in the Icelandic Eddas. As Old Norse gradually developed into the separate Scandinavian languages, Swedes apparently took to using Finn exclusively to refer to inhabitants of Finland, Finnish immigrants to Northern Norway in the 18th and 19th centuries were referred to as Kvens to distinguish them from the Sami Finns. Ethnic Finns are a group from Sami. In fact, Saxo never explicitly connects the Sami with the two Laplands, there is another suggestion that it originally meant wilds. In Finland and Sweden, Lapp is common in names, such as Lappi, Lappeenranta and Lapinlahti in Finland. As already mentioned, Finn is an element in Norwegian place names. In the North Sámi language, láhppon olmmoš means a person who is lost, Sámi refer to themselves as Sámit or Sápmelaš, the word Sámi being inflected into various grammatical forms. It has been proposed that Sámi, Häme, and perhaps Suomi are of the origin and ultimately borrowed from the Baltic word *žēmē. The Baltic word is cognate with Slavic земля, which means land. The Sámi institutions—notably the parliaments, radio and TV stations, theatres, etc. —all use the term Sámi, including when addressing outsiders in Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, or English

20.
Scandinavian Peninsula
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The name of the peninsula is derived from the term Scandinavia, the cultural region of Denmark, Norway and Sweden. The derived term Scandinavian also refers to the Germanic peoples who speak North Germanic languages, the Scandinavian Peninsula is the largest peninsula of Europe, larger than the Balkan, the Iberian and the Italian peninsulas. Arguably the largest peninsula in Europe, the Scandinavian Peninsula is approximately 1,850 kilometres long with a width varying approximately from 370 to 805 kilometres, the Scandinavian mountain range generally defines the border between Norway and Sweden. These mountains also have the largest glacier on the mainland of Europe, about one quarter of the Scandinavian Peninsula lies north of the Arctic Circle, its northernmost point being at Cape Nordkyn, Norway. The region is rich in timber, iron and copper with the best farmland in southern Sweden, large petroleum and natural-gas deposits have been found off Norways coast in the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. Much of the population of the Scandinavian Peninsula is naturally concentrated in its southern part, the largest cities of the peninsula are Stockholm, Sweden, Oslo, Norway, Gothenburg, Sweden, Malmö, Sweden and Bergen, Norway, in that order. The Scandinavian Peninsula occupies part of the Baltic Shield, a stable and large crust segment formed of very old, crystalline metamorphic rocks. Most of the soil covering this substrate was scraped by glaciers during the Ice Ages of antiquity, especially in northern Scandinavia, as a consequence of this scouring, the elevation of the land and the cool-to-cold climate, a relatively small percentage of its land is arable. The glaciation during the Ice Ages also deepened many of the river valleys, in the southern part of the peninsula, the glaciers deposited vast numbers of terminal moraines, configuring a very chaotic landscape. These terminal moraines covered all of what is now Denmark, when the ice sheet disappeared, the shield rose again, a tendency that continues to this day at a rate of about one metre per century. Conversely, the part has tended to sink to compensate, causing flooding of the Low Countries. The crystalline substrate of the land and absence of soil in places have exposed mineral deposits of metal ores, such as those of iron, copper, nickel, zinc, silver. The very most valuable of these have been the deposits of ore in northwestern Sweden. This railway is in a region of Norway and Sweden that otherwise does not have any railways because of the rugged terrain, mountains. The first recorded presence in the southern area of the peninsula. As the ice sheets from the glaciation retreated, the climate allowed a tundra biome that attracted reindeer hunters, the climate warmed up gradually, favouring the growth of evergreen trees first and then deciduous forest which brought animals like aurochs. Groups of hunter-fisher-gatherers started to inhabit the area from the Mesolithic, in the earliest recorded periods they occupied the arctic and subarctic regions as well as the central part of the peninsula as far south as Dalarna, Sweden. They speak the Sami language, a language of the Uralic family which is related to Finnish

21.
Kalix
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Kalix is a locality and the seat of the Kalix Municipality in Norrbotten County, Sweden. The name Kalix is believed to originate from the Sami word Gáláseatnu, or Kalasätno and it had 7,299 inhabitants in 2005, out of 17,300 inhabitants in the municipality of Kalix. There is a culinary speciality specific to Kalix, called Kalixlöjrom, the archipelago outside the Kalix coast line has 792 islands. Some of the islands in the Kalix archipelago include, Bergön is known as having the best sauna in the Kalix archipelago. Halsön has a white sand beach with barbecue camps. The true gem however, is Malören, Malören is the final outpost of the archipelago and has as such had maritime pilots placed there from the 1830s all the way up to 1967. The island has a church, a village with houses mostly used as summer cabins today. The archipelago is important to the people of Kalix - if one does not have a cabin there then at least a good boat to get from island to island in. And one of the highlights for the local population is the sailing races organized by the Kalix sail-. The perhaps most interesting building in Kalix is Kalix Church, the building of the church started in the first half of the 15th century. The first time it is mentioned in writing is in a letter written on June 29,1472 by archbishop Jakob Ulfsson Örnfot of Uppsala. The letter of indulgence was written on the day that the archbishop inaugurated the polyptych. About 4500 years ago the climate in the north of the Nordic countries started to warm up after the last ice age, the warmth together with isostasy made it possible to inhabit the area around Kalix. Already around year 1000 Kalix had goods from the forest and river which would cause people from the south to all the way up to Kalix. Kalix as a socken was first mentioned in 1482, before this point the area had been referred to with many different names, Caliss, Kaliss, Calixe, Calix and Neder Kalix. During the 18th century each village in the Kalix area had its own part of the river to fish Salmon and Common whitefish, the villages along the coast line caught Common bleak and Herring. Part of the catch was transported down south, along with Seal blubber, around 1660 a copper mine was opened south of Bodträsk by Moån village. At the end of the 18th century Björkfors village also opened a mine, on March 25,1809, Kalix was the location of the capitulation of the Swedish Army in the Finnish war

22.
Dialect continuum
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That happens, for example, across large parts of India or the Maghreb. Historically, it happened in various parts of Europe such as between Portugal, southern Belgium and southern Italy, and between Flanders and Austria. Leonard Bloomfield used the dialect area. It is analogous to a species in evolutionary biology. Dialect continua typically occur in long-settled agrarian populations, as innovations spread from their various points of origin as waves, in this situation, hierarchical classifications of varieties are impractical. Instead, dialectologists map variation of language features across a dialect continuum. The influential Atlas linguistique de la France pioneered the use of a trained fieldworker and these atlases typically consist of display maps, each showing local forms of a particular item at the survey locations. Secondary studies may include maps, showing the areal distribution of various variants. A common tool in these maps is an isogloss, a line separating areas where different variants of a particular feature predominate, in a dialect continuum, isoglosses for different features are typically spread out, reflecting the gradual transition between varieties. A bundle of coinciding isoglosses indicate a stronger dialect boundary, as might occur at geographical obstacles or long-standing political boundaries, in other cases, intersecting isoglosses and more complex patterns are found. Standard varieties may be developed and codified from one or more locations in a continuum, in such cases the local variety is said to be dependent on, or heteronomous with respect to, the standard variety. The Scandinavian languages, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish, are cited as examples. Conversely, a defined in this way may include local varieties that are mutually unintelligible. The choice of standard is determined by a political boundary. As a results, speakers on either side of the boundary may use almost identical varieties, but treat them as dependent on different standards, the choice may be a matter of national, regional or religious identity, and may be controversial. In the Yugoslav republic of Macedonia, a standard was developed from local varieties within a continuum with Serbia to the north, the standard was deliberately based on varieties from the west of the republic that were most different from standard Bulgarian. Now known as Macedonian, it is the standard of the independent Republic of Macedonia. Europe provides several examples of dialect continua, the largest of which involve the Germanic, Romance and Slavic branches of the Indo-European language family

23.
Svealand
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Svealand, Swealand or Sweden proper is the historical core region of Sweden. It is located in south central Sweden and is one of three lands of Sweden, bounded to the north by Norrland and to the south by Götaland, deep forests, Tiveden, Tylöskog, and Kolmården, separated Svealand from Götaland. Historically, its inhabitants were called Svear, from which is derived the English Swedes, Svealand consists of the capital region Mälardalen in the east, Roslagen in the north-east, the former mining district Bergslagen in the center, and Dalarna and Värmland in the west. The older name of Sweden in Swedish, Svea rike or the Realm of the Swedes, Swea Region, other forms are Sweoðeod, and Sweorice. As the domains of the Swedish kings grew, the name Svealand began to be used to separate the territory from the new. Since 1634, Sweden has been divided into counties instead of provinces, Svealand was the original Sweden, to which it gave its name. This is supported by linguistics and is based on medieval sources. In Old Norse and in Old English, Svealand and Sweden are synonymous, in Sögubrot af Nokkrum for instance, Kolmården between Svealand and Östergötland is described as the border between Sweden and Östergötland. In Hervarar saga, king Ingold I rides to Sweden through Östergötland, hann reið austr um Smáland ok í eystra Gautland ok svá í Svíþjóð. Sweoland is mentioned in the travels of Ohthere of Hålogaland around 890, the lord Bo Jonsson Grip was probably the one who was best acquainted with the geography of the Swedish kingdom since he owned more than half of it. In 1384, he stated in his will that the kingdom consisted of Swerige, the 15th-century Swedish version of the Þiðrekssaga says that Vilkinaland was formerly a name for Sweden and Götaland, wilcina land som nw är kalladh swerige oc götaland. A campaign to the east started by the kings of Svealand during the 12th century eventually conquered the provinces of Österland, an older name for Finland. In the early Middle Ages the modern province of Gästrikland was part of Tiundaland, for a time in the early 19th century, the province of Värmland belonged to the Court of Appeal for Svealand. Even though Värmland historically belonged to Götaland, it has by custom long been considered part of Svealand, Norrland Götaland Österland Rike Media related to Svealand at Wikimedia Commons

24.
Norwegian language
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Norwegian is a North Germanic language spoken mainly in Norway, where it is the official language. Along with Swedish and Danish, Norwegian forms a continuum of more or less mutually intelligible local and regional variants. These Scandinavian languages, together with Faroese and Icelandic as well as extinct languages. Faroese and Icelandic are hardly mutually intelligible with Norwegian in their spoken form because continental Scandinavian has diverged from them, as established by law and governmental policy, the two official forms of written Norwegian are Bokmål and Nynorsk. The official Norwegian Language Council is responsible for regulating the two forms, and recommends the terms Norwegian Bokmål and Norwegian Nynorsk in English. Two other written forms without official status also exist, one and it is regulated by the unofficial Norwegian Academy, which translates the name as Standard Norwegian. Nynorsk and Bokmål provide standards for how to write Norwegian, no standard of spoken Norwegian is officially sanctioned, and most Norwegians speak their own dialects in all circumstances. Thus, unlike in other countries, the use of any Norwegian dialect. Outside Eastern Norway, this variation is not used. From the 16th to the 19th centuries, Danish was the written language of Norway. As a result, the development of modern written Norwegian has been subject to strong controversy related to nationalism, rural versus urban discourse, historically, Bokmål is a Norwegianised variety of Danish, while Nynorsk is a language form based on Norwegian dialects and puristic opposition to Danish. The unofficial form known as Riksmål is considered more conservative than Bokmål, Norwegians are educated in both Bokmål and Nynorsk. A2005 poll indicates that 86. 3% use primarily Bokmål as their written language,5. 5% use both Bokmål and Nynorsk, and 7. 5% use primarily Nynorsk. Thus, 13% are frequently writing Nynorsk, though the majority speak dialects that resemble Nynorsk more closely than Bokmål. Broadly speaking, Nynorsk writing is widespread in western Norway, though not in major urban areas, examples are Setesdal, the western part of Telemark county and several municipalities in Hallingdal, Valdres, and Gudbrandsdalen. It is little used elsewhere, but 30–40 years ago, it also had strongholds in rural parts of Trøndelag. Today, not only is Nynorsk the official language of four of the 19 Norwegian counties, NRK, the Norwegian broadcasting corporation, broadcasts in both Bokmål and Nynorsk, and all governmental agencies are required to support both written languages. Bokmål is used in 92% of all publications, and Nynorsk in 8%

25.
Danish language
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There are also minor Danish-speaking communities in Norway, Sweden, Spain, the United States, Canada, Brazil and Argentina. Due to immigration and language shift in urban areas, around 15–20% of the population of Greenland speak Danish as their home language. Along with the other North Germanic languages, Danish is a descendant of Old Norse, until the 16th century, Danish was a continuum of dialects spoken from Schleswig to Scania with no standard variety or spelling conventions. With the Protestant Reformation and the introduction of printing, a language was developed which was based on the educated Copenhagen dialect. It spread through use in the system and administration though German. Today, traditional Danish dialects have all but disappeared, though there are variants of the standard language. The main differences in language are between generations, with youth language being particularly innovative, Danish has a very large vowel inventory comprising 27 phonemically distinctive vowels, and its prosody is characterized by the distinctive phenomenon stød, a kind of laryngeal phonation type. The grammar is moderately inflective with strong and weak conjugations and inflections, nouns and demonstrative pronouns distinguish common and neutral gender. As in English, Danish only has remnants of a case system, particularly in the pronouns. Its syntax is V2, with the verb always occupying the second slot in the sentence. Danish is a Germanic language of the North Germanic branch, other names for this group are the Nordic or Scandinavian languages. Along with Swedish, Danish descends from the Eastern dialects of the Old Norse language, Scandinavian languages are often considered a dialect continuum, where there are no sharp dividing lines between the different vernacular languages. Like Norwegian and Swedish, Danish was significantly influenced by Low German in the Middle Ages, Danish itself can be divided into three main dialect areas, West Danish, Insular Danish, and East Danish. Danish is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Swedish, both Swedes and Danes also understand Norwegian better than they understand each others languages. By the 8th century, the common Germanic language of Scandinavia, Proto-Norse, had some changes. This language was called the Danish tongue, or Norse language. Norse was written in the alphabet, first with the elder futhark. From the 7th century the common Norse language began to undergo changes that did not spread to all of Scandinavia, most of the changes separating East Norse from West Norse started as innovations in Denmark, that spread through Scania into Sweden and by maritime contact to southern Norway

26.
Viking ships
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Viking ships were marine vessels of unique design, built by the Vikings during the Viking Age. The boat-types were quite varied, depending on what the ship was intended for and they were clinker built, which is the overlapping of planks riveted together. Some might have had a head or other circular object protruding from the bow and stern, for design. Viking ships were not just used for their military prowess but for long-distance trade, in the literature, Viking ships are usually seen divided into two broad categories, merchant ships and warships. These categories are overlapping, some kinds of merchant ships, built for transporting cargo specifically, were regularly deployed as warships. The majority of Viking ships were designed for sailing rivers, fjords and coastal waters, while a few types, such as the knarr, could navigate the open sea and even the ocean. The Viking ships ranged from the Baltic Sea to far from the Scandinavian homelands, to Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Greenland, Newfoundland, the Mediterranean, the Black Sea and Africa. Scandinavia is a region with relatively high mountain ranges, dense forests. Consequently, trade routes were operated via shipping, as inland travel was both more hazardous and cumbersome. The Viking kingdoms developed into cities, all of which were deeply dependent on the North Sea. Control of the waterways was of importance, and consequently advanced war ships were in high demand. But in fact, because of their importance, ships became a mainstay of the Viking pagan religion, as they evolved into symbols of power. Throughout the first millennium, respectable Viking chieftains and noblemen were commonly buried with an intact, furthermore, the Hedeby coins, among the earliest known Danish currency, have ships as emblems, showing the importance of naval vessels in the area. Through such cultural and practical significance, the Viking ship progressed into the most powerful, a faering is an open rowboat with two pairs of oars, commonly found in most boat-building traditions in Western and Northern Scandinavia, dating back to the Viking Age. Knarr is the Norse term for ships that were built for Atlantic voyages and they were cargo ships averaging a length of about 54 feet, a beam of 15 feet, and a hull capable of carrying up to 122 tons. Because of this, the knarr was used for longer voyages, ocean going transports, the design of the knarr later influenced the design of the cog, used in the Baltic Sea by the Hanseatic League. Longships were naval vessels made and used by the Vikings from Scandinavia and Iceland for trade, commerce, exploration, and warfare during the Viking Age. The longships design evolved over years, beginning in the Stone Age with the invention of the umiak and continuing up to the 9th century with the Nydam

27.
Bothnian Bay
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The Bothnian Bay or Bay of Bothnia is the northernmost part of the Gulf of Bothnia, which is in turn the northern part of the Baltic Sea. The land holding the bay is still rising after the weight of ice-age glaciers has been removed, the bay today is fed by several large rivers, and is relatively unaffected by tides, so has low salinity. It freezes each year for up to six months, compared to other parts of the Baltic it has little plant or animal life. The bay is divided from the Bothnian Sea, the part of the Gulf of Bothnia. The Northern Quark has a greatest depth of 65 metres, with two ridges that are just 25 metres deep and it lies between a group of islands off Vaasa in Finland and another group at Holmöarna in Sweden. The bay is bounded by Finland to the east and Sweden to the west, the bay is asymmetric, with a smoother and shallower bottom slope on the Finnish side, and a deeper bottom with a steeper and more rugged coast on the Swedish side. The Bothnian Bay has a catchment area of 260,675 square kilometres, of this, 56% lies in Finland, 44% in Sweden and less than 1% in Norway. The catchment contains about 11,500,000 hectares of forest, the average depth is 41 metres. The Luleå Deep is the deepest part of the bay, at 146 metres, on the Finnish side the average depth is 30 metres. The deepest part is near the island of Lönkytin, with a depth of 50 metres, the bay lies in the area in Northern Europe where the ice was at its thickest during the last ice age. The Bay of Bothnia was under ice until the Ancylus Lake period, the land is now rising by post-glacial rebound at the highest rate in the Baltic Sea, at an estimated rate of 9 millimetres a year. Today the Bothnian Bay lies around 300 metres higher than it did at the end of the Ice age, the local population has seen the sea retreating during their lifetimes from piers and boathouses, leaving them stranded on land. Some former islands such as Porsön and Hertsön near the city of Luleå are still called islands, the maximum depth at the Kvarken sound today is around 20 metres. In about 2,000 years the exit from the bay at Kvarken will be raised above sea level, the outflow of this lake will be significant. The total inflow to the bay is about 2,500 cubic metres per second, roughly the same as the Russian Neva River, the Bothnian Bay has a harsher environment than other parts of the greater Baltic sea. The bay is ice-covered for 110 to 190 days each year, tides have little effect, but high winds driving the water from the south or north may cause the water level to rise or fall by 1.5 metres. Major rivers that flow into the bay include, The salinity is only about 0.2 psu in the part of the bay. The low salinity and cold temperatures in winter results in ice that is stronger than more saline or warmer ice

Map showing area of Norse settlements during the 8th to 11th centuries (which includes the Viking Age), including Norman conquests, some extending after this period (yellow). Trade and raid routes, often inseparable, are marked.

The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin …

The authors of textbooks or similar publications often create revised versions of the IPA chart to express their own preferences or needs. The image displays one such version. Only the black symbols are part of the IPA; common additional symbols are in grey.